Working
on this exhibit allowed me to combine two of my favorite interests,
photography and genealogy. Photographically, I wanted to create a
body of work using the pinhole camera. As I began to work, my
original intent was to create hand-colored black and white pinhole
images inspired by the boxes and tins used to make the pinhole
cameras, and to exhibit the cameras with the photographs. So, I spent
weeks making pinhole cameras.
Once I began testing the cameras for light leaks, and working on the
pinhole diameter making the images became more important than the
cameras. I was collecting objects to photograph which reflected the
cameras, and ended up with a collection of old family
"stuff". Not quite antiques, just stuff from childhood, and
mementos of generations past. One of the boxes I was using as a
camera had a Halloween theme, and I began creating Day of the Dead
altars to photograph. The materials and props I collected for the
altars were gaudy, ghoulish and colorful, and led me to make a camera
to hold a Polaroid film cartridge, which I used to photograph the
altars in color as well. It turned out that Polaroid 600 Platinum
film created for the One-Step camera was quite well suited for
pinhole work. The ISO is 640 and the fast speed resulted in 15 second
exposures in the studio using 2, 500 watt lights and a daylight blue
gel filter. Or exposures from 15 seconds to one minute in available
daylight. Now I was spending more time making altars and using the
Polaroid pinhole camera than I was making images to fulfill my
original intent with the 20 or so other cameras I had made. One day
just before Day of the Dead on November 6, 2000 I brought in photos
of my parents as young adults to use in an altar. These two pictures
"Fay" and "Jean" started this exhibit. I was
encouraged by the qualities the pinhole camera brought to the old
photos, and I loved combining the photos with objects personal to my
experience, but which could tell many other stories depending upon
the viewer's imagination.

IMAGES

(LEFT
TO RIGHT)

Stella

Jewel
Box

Young
Fay

Tea
for Two

Dora

Jean

Roy

Swan

Three
Sisters

Mattie

Stella
and Fay

Rose
(Polaroid image transfer of cross-processed slide)

Fay

Jean's
Christening

Genealogically,
I fell in love with a cardboard box in the stairway closet when I
was about 13 years old. About the time I was beginning to feel all
the usual "who am I" adolescent angst. I loved sitting on
the floor of the closet and going through this big cardboard box
which was mostly photographs with a few birth certificates, school
memorabilia and news clippings thrown in.There were the photo albums
made by my paternal grandmother. Black felted paper and embossed
photo corners held the wavy edged photographs of family memories. My
father's family were camera bugs. Or just vain. Or both. They
photographed new clothes, new cars, family pets, and occasionally the
laundry. The oldest album has photos of my grandmother's high school
graduation and my grandfather at the age of fourteen. It also
documents the gay life of a group of young cousins and friends in
their twenties, in Illinois, around 100 years ago. The descriptions
of the photos are written with an old pen dipped into opaque white
ink. There was an album my grandmother made documenting her only
son's career in the Army Air Corps during WWII. My father had started
an album documenting his college days...whimsical outings which ended
when the war began. My mother's album went a bit beyond high school,
and included short stories she had submitted to writing contests, a
Valentine she had sent to a boy which was returned because he had
moved, and suggestions of a serious "boyfriend" before my
father. I became the keeper of the cardboard box of photos and the
family Bibles and about three years ago began to revisit the
treasures to glean whatever information I could to document my family
history.The old photographs I have used in the prints for this
exhibit are all my ancestors, and for the most part were taken before
I was born. These are people I never knew. Young people who had hopes
and dreams and ideas for a life that were probably quite different
than the life they ended with. The pinhole camera was the perfect
technology for my illustrations. It wouldn't seem right to me to make
crystal clear studio table top shots of the altars. It would be like
my saying I really knew these people and their lives. In fact I only
had a fuzzy, indistinct and childish impression of these lives. And,
if a light leak creates a "ghost" on the film, well...who
knows. It is an exhibit of personal images, with what I think is the
universal appeal of old photographs and the idea of having a peek
into the past and someone else's life.

These
images were first exhibted at the Darkroom Gallery in Sacramento,
California in 2001, and subsequently at Modesto Junior College in 2004.